World Biden to introduce nominees as White House transition begins

US President-elect Joe Biden is to formally introduce his nominees for top national security and foreign policy posts on Tuesday as the White House transition finally gets underway with Donald Trump effectively -- if not explicitly -- admitting defeat.

© CHANDAN KHANNA Vice President-elect Kamala Harris

© SAUL LOEB Corn and Cob, a pair of turkeys that will be pardoned by US President Donald Trump

The green-lighting of the transition came after Michigan certified a Biden victory on Monday and more members of Trump's Republican Party came out demanding the impasse end.

Trump's long-shot efforts to overturn the November 3 election results received a further blow on Tuesday when Pennsylvania certified that Biden had won the Keystone State.

Biden’s top White House team to feature campaign veterans

President-elect Joe Biden names close confidants and key campaign leaders to key White House positions.Biden confirmed that former campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon will serve as deputy chief of staff, while campaign co-chair Louisiana Representative Cedric Richmond and campaign adviser Steve Ricchetti will play senior roles in the new administration. Richmond will leave his Louisiana congressional seat to fill the White House job.

He spent billions of dollars revitalising neglected housing . Biden announced several key appointments and nominations for his national security and foreign policy team. President-elect Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris will introduce their nominees for national security and

President-elect Joe Biden will now begin receiving security briefings. The move allows Biden to coordinate with US federal agencies on plans for taking over on to millions of dollars of government money to begin the transition to the White House . focus for his administration by naming John Kerry, the former secretary-of-state and presidential nominee , as his special presidential envoy for

Biden, 78, revealed his picks on Monday for secretary of state, national security advisor, secretary of homeland security, and other top administration posts.

Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, are to publicly present the nominees to the press at a 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) event at the Queen theater in Biden's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

Shortly before the Biden event was to begin, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room to make brief unscheduled remarks.

Trump, who has made few public appearances since his election defeat, touted the Dow Jones Industrial Average surging past the 30,000-point level for the first time ever.

© JIM WATSON President Donald Trump has made few public appearances since his election defeat

"Despite everything that's taken place with the pandemic, I'm very thrilled with what's happened on the vaccine front, that's been absolutely incredible," Trump said.

The GOP’s Big Self-Own

Republican support for Trump’s election-fraud claims isn’t just damaging to Biden and democracy—it’s damaging to Republicans too.By reinforcing Trump’s baseless narrative that he actually won the vote, Republicans could be suffocating President-elect Joe Biden’s already-slim chances of attracting any meaningful support from rank-and-file Republican voters, which will make it much tougher for him to build bipartisan coalitions in Congress.

The General Services Administration has informed President-elect Joe Biden that the Trump administration is ready to begin the formal transition process, according to a letter from Administrator Emily Murphy sent Monday afternoon and obtained by CNN.

GSA informs Biden it is ready to begin formal transition ; Trump tweets that Biden ’s transition team welcomed the GSA’s move as “a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our He worked for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, moved to the White House to work for President

"But the stock market has just broken 30,000, never been broken that number, that's a sacred number, 30,000, nobody thought they'd ever see it," he said.

Trump, who is scheduled to attend a traditional Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning event at the White House later in the day, left without responding to shouted questions from reporters.

Biden's public unveiling of his nominees comes after Trump signed off on the start of the White House transition while still refusing to concede the November 3 election.

The outgoing president acknowledged on Monday it was time for the General Services Administration (GSA) to unblock funding for the Biden transition team.

Trump 74, continued to insist, however, that he would ultimately be declared the winner of the election despite having failed to present any credible evidence of fraud and suffering a string of humiliating defeats in court.

Biden Must Chart a Bold Path in His Foreign Policy

His presidency may be the establishment’s last best chance to demonstrate that liberal internationalism is a superior strategy to populist nationalism. He must consider the strategic options generated by an ideologically diverse team, and he has to make big choices that are attuned to the politics of the moment, in the United States and around the world. Such a bold path is not one that a newly elected president with no foreign-policy experience could take. But he can.

Joe Biden has begun receiving the keys to government. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters. It also gives Biden officials access to office space and funds to pay the transition team. Opaque role of ‘clearing house ’ – The government has been accused of operating an “Orwellian” unit known as the

© Provided by Zee News. US President Donald Trump on Monday (November 23) came his closest yet to admitting defeat in November 3 Presidential Election after General Services Administration (GSA), which was tasked with helping President-elect Joe Biden 's transition into the White House said it

© CHANDAN KHANNA US President-elect Joe Biden is to formally introduce his top cabinet picks

"Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail!" he tweeted late Monday.

Trump continued in the same defiant vein on Tuesday.

"The GSA does not determine who the next President of the United States will be," he tweeted.

He also retweeted a picture of himself in the Oval Office with the caption: "I concede NOTHING!!!!!"

- 'Crisis-tested' -

The GSA determination that Biden is the apparent winner gives the president-elect access to classified briefings on national security threats and will allow his top aides to coordinate with federal health officials on addressing the worsening Covid-19 pandemic.

© ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS, JIM WATSON IMAGES US President-elect Joe Biden holds a virtual meeting with mayors of American cities at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Delaware.

Unveiling the cabinet selections, the Biden team said they were "experienced, crisis-tested leaders who are ready to hit the ground running on day one."

Biden announces first cabinet posts of administration

The president-elect named nominees for secretary of state, homeland security, national security adviser, among others.The nominees on Monday included Antony Blinken for secretary of state, Alejandro Mayorkas to be secretary of homeland security, Avril Haines for director of national intelligence, Jake Sullivan for national security adviser, Linda Thomas-Greenfield for US ambassador to the United Nations and former Secretary of State John Kerry to be the special presidential envoy for climate.

They will begin "working immediately" to address the defining challenges of our time -- from infectious disease to terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyber threats and climate change," it said.

The slate unveiled by Biden includes veterans of the Barack Obama administration and signals a return to traditional US diplomacy.

© Gal ROMA Factfile on Joe Biden, elected as 46th president of the United States, his key proposals and the next vice president Kamala Harris.

Former State Department number two Antony Blinken was tapped to be secretary of state while Jake Sullivan, who advised Biden when he was vice president under Obama, was nominated to be national security advisor.

Biden named the first woman, Avril Haines, as director of national intelligence, and Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security, whose policing of tough immigration restrictions under Trump was a frequent source of controversy.

Following through on his campaign promise to raise the profile of global warming threats, Biden named former secretary of state John Kerry as a new special envoy on climate issues.

Blinken is expected to spearhead a dismantling of Trump's "America First" policies, including rejoining the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and resurrecting the Obama-crafted Iran nuclear deal.

Career diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield was nominated to be UN ambassador while former Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen is expected to be named Treasury Secretary, the first woman to hold the job.

With Biden having won a comfortable victory, Trump's last card is to try to disrupt the normally routine process of state-by-state certification of results.

Like it has elsewhere, that effort failed in Michigan on Monday and in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, and there appears to be little Trump can do to prevent the Electoral College from meeting on December 14 to certify Biden's victory.

Biden received 306 votes to Trump's 232 in the Electoral College that determines the White House winner.

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